Villain

by Michael Grant

  Screams and pleas for mercy.

  He knew Shade would be back soon, and that they would once again flee the scene, run away to their next illegal, temporary abode.

  Shade. He knew she was trying desperately to make things right. And he knew that she could not.

  Sad, he thought, that it had taken his own destruction to teach Shade humility. Humility that might have allowed them in an earlier time to remain together, to be still what they had once been: lovers. The arrogance in Shade, the obsession with the FAYZ, and the seething, impossible-to-satisfy thirst for revenge against the creature that had killed her mother were not gone, but now they were tempered by reality. By the brutal reality of unintended consequences.

  Unintended Consequences, Exhibit A: Malik Tenerife.

  But his thoughts scattered under a sudden surge of attention from the Dark Watchers. They seemed more intrusive than ever, and his anger rose. Whoever, whatever they were, they had no right! They had no right to torture him this way!

  He almost didn’t do it. He almost convinced himself it was futile and juvenile and pointless.

  He almost did not lash out at the Dark Watchers.

  But Malik was controlling himself on multiple fronts all at once, and he was all out of patience.

  No answers? Nothing to say to me, Dark ones? Well, I have something to say to you.

  He summoned all his will, all his new and unwanted power, and fixed clearly in his mind not the picture of the Dark Watchers, for they had no shape or form, but the idea of them, the concept of the Dark Watchers, the emotion they caused in him. He pictured a data wire reaching down from some extra-dimensional space, a segment of USB cable plugged into his brain, down which came the eyeless spies, the invisible burglars of the mind.

  Wires, he reasoned, carry current in both directions. They wanted the Malik experience? Fine.

  Enjoy, assholes.

  Malik fired a massive wave of pain, targeted on them. He screamed and raged and roared silently at them, directing every ounce of his agony, his sadness, his despair and rage at them, them, them.

  “Oh!” Malik cried out. His eyes flew open.

  “What?” Cruz asked, knee-walking to him.

  “They . . . Oh, my God, Cruz!”

  “What? What?”

  “I hit them! I sent them pain. And Cruz? I think . . . I think maybe they . . . felt it. It was like, like . . .” He sat up, eyes bright, a weird half smile on his lips. “You know what it’s like when you drop a glass in the lunchroom, and suddenly there’s total silence because absolutely every eye is staring at you?”

  “Okay.”

  “It was like that, Cruz. They heard me. They felt me. The little bacterium under their microscope just gave them the finger.”

  Shade was ready to go. She had done what she came to do. She would upload her videos, show the world what was happening at the Ranch.

  But her eye was drawn to that imposing rectangular office above her, perched on the side of the cavern.

  No one could stop her. The Ranch was finished. She could see that. The guards might eventually organize some kind of resistance, but how many of them would survive that long?

  She spotted a metal staircase and was up it in a blink. There was a heavy steel door to the office. Locked. And not likely to be opened any time soon. She leaped to the roof, then leaned over the edge to see the single long window. It was bulletproof glass, able to withstand a high-powered rifle shot.

  But bulletproof was one thing, and Shade-proof was a very different matter.

  She pried a large rock from the cavern wall, leaned again over the edge of the roof, and smashed the rock into the glass.

  Nothing much.

  Then, using the strength her morph gave her, as well as the speed, she smashed the rock into the glass a hundred times in a few seconds. The glass starred and cracked. A small hole, about big enough to push a pencil through.

  Given time, she could smash her way in. But was it worth it?

  She had to use one hand to shield the reflective light and peer inside. A woman in army uniform was just rising shakily to her feet. That uniform was askew, and her hair was plastered down with sweat. Her face was ashen.

  Shade tapped the rock again, using the dum-pa-da-dum-dum . . . dum-dum rhythm.

  The woman turned slowly, cringing. Her eyes widened as she saw Shade’s upside-down face.

  “Hey!” Shade said.

  The woman’s face twisted in rage and she shouted something that Shade did not hear but could guess at. The woman was white with fury, spittle hanging at the corners of her mouth.

  Shade said, “Can’t hear you, but I have a message.”

  At which point Shade raised a middle finger and held it for long enough that it would be easily visible—and she hoped very memorable—to the officer.

  Then she was away, running across the cavern floor, a battlefield, dodging man and machine and things in between. She zoomed up the stairs, through the corridors, and emerged with a sigh of relief into the open air.

  She found Cruz and Malik where she had left them, blurred to a stop, and de-morphed.

  “What happened?” Cruz asked eagerly. “Are you okay?”

  Shade said, “Look,” and pointed down the hill to the Ranch. A woman in a white coat ran from a monster made of needles. She tripped and the creature rolled over her, stabbing her a hundred times, leaving human Salisbury steak behind.

  All around the compound, men and women fled before avenging beasts and racing cyborgs beneath the pitiless lights. Smoke rose from one building. An explosion rocked another, blowing out windows. Machine guns chattered. And all the while the news helicopters swept over and back, sending pictures to the world.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Shade said.

  “They’re tearing that man apart!” Cruz cried, pointing.

  Shade grabbed her shoulder. “What do you think that man did to deserve it?”

  But Cruz could not stop looking. It was a scene out of a horror movie, monsters versus humans, a massacre without heroism or nobility. Slaughter. Bloody, remorseless slaughter.

  “My God, Shade,” Cruz said in a whisper. “This is our future, isn’t it? This is the world now!”

  Malik, eyes barely open, said one word. “War.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Everything’s Coming Up Dekka

  FRANCIS SPECTER KNEW nothing of what was happening in Las Vegas when she saw the road sign for Las Vegas, grinned beneath her dark plexiglass visor, and turned her motorcycle north toward the distantly glowing city. She figured the outskirts of Vegas would be a good place to find a motel and spend the night.

  It occurred to her that she could easily use her power to enter any room she liked, but the truth was that a simple motel would be more luxury and normalcy than she had known since early childhood. Anyway, she was squeamish about continuing to commit crimes. She had escaped the gang—permanently, judging by the size of the explosion from the Predator’s missile—and she fervently hoped that she had also escaped that whole criminal life of drugs and drunken fights and stealing. She was on a quest for normalcy. She would have gladly traded her Rockborn power for a life as an anonymous high school kid with nothing to worry about but grades.

  She had been a long time in the wilderness.

  But now as she drew near the city she saw a seemingly endless flow of cars and trucks heading out of town. It was night, and yet it almost looked as if people were fleeing. In fact the traffic soon spilled out of its own lanes and invaded extra lanes so that anyone going toward the city had to thread their way through oncoming cars.

  She pulled off the highway to get a bottle of water at a convenience store, but as she was taking off her helmet she saw something even stranger than the mad rush of cars leaving Las Vegas. She saw two motorcycles, driven by what were either two people in amazingly convincing cosplay costumes . . . or were mutants in morph.

  She stuck her helmet back on and went in pursuit.

  General DiMarco s
trode stiff-legged through the wreckage of the Ranch. A drained and traumatized Atwell whispered in her ear from time to time, giving an update on what was coming in from the damage assessment team, as well as what was happening in the media, and he reminded her of calls pending from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and more.

  Two things were clear to DiMarco. One: The Ranch might be finished, done for, unless something happened to move public opinion sharply against the mutants.

  And two: Something like that had just happened in Las Vegas.

  “Coverage is forty percent Vegas, sixty percent the Ranch,” Atwell said as DiMarco nodded curt acknowledgment at a bleeding staff doctor being loaded onto a gurney, his body a mass of blood-soaked gauze.

  “The full Shade Darby tape is up on YouTube, and the hit counter is going crazy.”

  “Show me,” DiMarco said.

  The two of them stood in the blood of slaughtered scientists and techs and security men and watched Atwell’s phone.

  DiMarco’s eye twitched. Her mouth was a snarl. She watched the brief videos of the cells. Followed by Shade’s opening of same. The speech by Tolliver. And Shade Darby’s final, arrogant speech to the camera.

  “I’m Shade Darby. This horror show is run by the US government, by a group called Homeland Security Task Force 66. Do you see what they’re doing here? Do you see what they’re doing supposedly in your name? So who are the bad guys? Us or them?”

  DiMarco and Atwell stood near the spot where Shade had addressed the recently liberated. They were at the center of the great cavern, and now DiMarco turned slowly, taking in the fires, the shattered glass, the twisted steel, the smoke, the bodies. The parts of bodies. It had been a surprisingly deliberate, complete, and disciplined act of annihilation, led by that goddamned marine who had broken into the armory and wreaked the kind of purposeful havoc that only a professional soldier could create. (The bulldozer Shade had leaped atop had been later blown apart by one of Tolliver’s missiles.) DiMarco had barely a handful of uninjured staff still present.

  “We are now at twenty-two confirmed dead, ninety-six seriously wounded, another eighty with less serious wounds.”

  “That’s half of them,” DiMarco snapped. “Where are the rest?”

  Atwell hesitated a revealing few seconds before saying, “Many are chasing the mutants down in the woods.”

  DiMarco snorted. “Sure they are. Some. But most are running for their lives from our creatures!”

  Suddenly, Atwell noted bitterly, it wasn’t my creatures but ours.

  No, you vile woman, they are yours, and the results are yours as well. Though, he knew, his career was now bound to hers. His time in the US Army—which he had expected to serve for thirty years—was just about over.

  I’ll go work for Janet’s father rehabbing old homes in Kansas City. I’ll never speak of this to anyone. Ever.

  “Well, Mike, we are screwed good and proper,” the general said. She’d been able to change into a clean uniform. Atwell had not had a spare uniform, and the urine stain on the front of his trousers had only just begun to dry.

  “We can rebuild . . . start at least some of the programs again . . .” Atwell shrugged.

  DiMarco was silent, looking around, feeling her career sliding off the edge of a cliff. She had to act quickly and she knew it. The secretary of defense was not calling to congratulate her.

  “How far is it from Fort Irwin to Vegas?” she asked.

  He Google-Mapped it. “Three hours, give or take.”

  “Okay. Put me through to the commander at Irwin. I’m not relieved of duty yet. And I still have the authority.”

  “May I ask what you want from Fort Irwin?”

  DiMarco laughed, a short, bitter sound. “What do I want from the national tank training facility? What do you think I want? Tanks. That’s what I want: tanks! And one other thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Darby was briefed. Had to have been. She’s in contact with Dekka Talent. That’s the heart of this: Tom Peaks’s misguided experiment: Dekka. Shade is smart, but Dekka is a leader. She just moved to the number-one spot. I don’t care what it takes, what we have to do, but that . . . young woman . . . needs to die.”

  It had been a very close call for Dillon and Saffron. The ease with which Dekka and Armo had taken him down had left him fearful. He had power, amazing power, but it did not seem to work on either of them. Which meant it was likely that his power could not affect any mutant in morph.

  Which was very, very bad news.

  “I shouldn’t have killed those cops,” Dillon muttered. “I thought it would kind of get a laugh. . . . Now they’re just all going to be focused on getting rid of me.”

  “They tried to arrest you,” Saffron said sullenly.

  It had been her suggestion that Dillon send a strong warning of his power. That warning had turned into an order to two policemen to leap from the tower to their deaths. So much for his briefly held determination not to kill. Hey, if people wanted to kill him, what was he supposed to do?

  Saffron was pale and trembling with either fear or fury or some combination of both, but she did not argue as Dillon announced that it was time to get the hell away from the Venetian. It was not good to be a target and sit in a known location, waiting. The two Rockborn who’d come after him could come back.

  They pushed through rampaging tourists and overwhelmed cops who did not yet know what either of them looked like. The Strip was a scene of panic, cars driving up onto sidewalks to get around stalled cars or bodies lying in the street. From time to time the angry, concussive noise of gunfire erupted. A billboard truck advertising a strip-tease show swerved madly and toppled onto its side in a spray of sparks.

  “We have to keep moving,” Dillon said, grabbing Saffron’s hand and pulling her along.

  “Earmuffs,” Saffron sobbed. “That’s all it takes to stop you!”

  Earmuffs and the Rockborn, Dillon corrected silently. He flashed on the old Verizon ads: Can you hear me now? Probably something there . . . should make a note in his comedy notebook . . . later.

  “We have to get out of here, find some new place, some place to hide, to . . . to rest . . . to think,” Dillon said.

  “Think?” Saffron snarled. “Every minute that goes by they’ll be more ready. My God, I can’t believe all of this is happening!”

  An army, that was what Dillon needed, an army. Not the ancient relics who pulled the slot-machine crank handles at the Venetian, but younger, fitter, more capable people.

  “You were right about one thing you said,” Dillon said to Saffron as they pushed through the killing crowds using Dillon’s voice to part the waters. “I need an army. An army of voice slaves. But, who? Where am I going to find them?”

  Saffron was completely unprepared for the level of insanity in the street. She cowered and flinched and said, “That crazy man back there almost stabbed me!”

  Then Dillon spotted something. A woman wearing a San Jose State jersey. He grabbed her as she tried to bite his arm. “Stop attacking me. Answer me: Why are you here?”

  The woman blinked. “I . . . I came because we had tickets for the game, but they turned out to be forgeries. I couldn’t get in.”

  “This game, it was tonight?”

  The woman—who seconds before had been desperately searching for someone to kill—shrugged. “It’s still going on, I guess.”

  Dillon and Saffron exchanged glances. A man filled with a Dillon-enraged need to kill, kill, kill, ran his Jeep into a gaggle of frantic pedestrians, throwing broken bodies left and right before stalling out atop a pile of squirming, screaming victims.

  “Get out,” Dillon ordered the man, who was weeping and apologizing and whimpering that he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t stop. Dillon jumped in behind the wheel, leaned over to open the passenger door for Saffron, and saw her dragged back by a large bald man.

  “Hey, you, baldy! Leave her alone!”

  The bald man insta
ntly released Saffron, and she grabbed the headrest and tried to pull herself into the car when a man raced up, swung a meat cleaver, and cut into the back of her neck and through her spinal cord. Dillon saw her eyes go from alert to alarmed to wounded, like she couldn’t believe the unfairness . . . before going blank. She was dead before she slumped to the ground.

  Dillon whinnied in terror, pushed the gear shift into reverse and jammed on the gas, running over more people, swerved wildly, and then fishtailed out onto the Strip before being blocked by traffic.

  “Get out of my way!” he yelled out of the window, but other drivers had their windows rolled up for safety and heard nothing. So he rammed the space between the nearest two cars, and looking back in his rearview mirror saw Saffron’s body, her head at an impossible angle.

  The mass lunacy Dillon had created now enveloped Dillon’s stolen car so that he advanced at a snail’s pace. He sat fuming, weeping, begging the audience of watchers in his head to show him a way.

  But that wasn’t how it was going to work, Dillon realized. If the Dark Watchers had any affection for him, they’d have warned him about that Dekka creature and her furry white friend.

  No, they only watched, he realized bitterly. They really were just an audience, but like a cynical New York audience, they were just as pleased to see him flop.

  “I’m on my own,” Dillon said to the steering wheel. “Everyone is against me.”

  It was, he told himself, unfair.

  “Jesus!” Cruz erupted as Shade drove her and Malik away down dimly lit, serpentine mountain roads in a purloined BMW previously owned by a Ranch geneticist who was currently dragging his bleeding body through the woods. Cruz was staring at her phone.

  “What?” Shade snapped.

  “Something . . . It’s nuts, I mean nuts. Crazy. Las Vegas! There’s some kind of full-on battle taking place, thousands of people under some kind of mind control. Dead people everywhere!”

  “Mind control?” Shade asked. “Are you kidding me now?”

  Cruz leaned forward, holding her phone for Shade to see. Shade was no longer in morph, so driving at normal human speed since they had spotted no pursuit, which she slowed to a crawl as she watched the video.